Alex Haley

Three years before "Roots" was published I interviewed Alex Haley for nine straight hours in San Francisco. Haley had been writing all night and had taken several showers. He said he thought of writing as a surgical process and that he needed to be clean when he wrote. I had prepared 160 questions after researching Haley for six months but cake had never crossed my mind. He told me a favorite pastime was to bake a pound cake from scratch, pop it in the oven, pull up a stool and watch the cake through the glass door, speculating on where the first bubble would appear.

Hans Massaquoi, a former managing editor of Ebony magazine who wrote a distinctive memoir about his unusual childhood growing up black in Nazi Germany, died in Jacksonville, Fla., on Saturday, his 87th birthday. He had been hospitalized over the Christmas holidays, said his son, Hans J. Massaquoi Jr. Inspired by the late Alex Haley, the author of "Roots," Massaquoi decided to share his experience of being "both an insider in Nazi Germany and, paradoxically, an endangered outsider.

September 28, 1992 | WILLIAM H. TURNER, Turner, founder of the Black Mountain Improvement Assn., is a Ph.D . who lives in Winston Salem, N.C., where he writes and teaches college courses centered on rural life among African-Americans

The plight of our fellow citizens in Florida, Louisiana and Hawaii provides an excellent analogy for what is now brewing in East Tennessee, the results of which will scatter hither and yon yet other precious landmarks of this fragile world: Alex Haley's estate, which is to be auctioned later this week (reported Sunday and in Calendar, Sept. 8). The untimely death of Haley in February (African-American History Month) devastated me.

SEATTLE - Adding to a season full of headaches for Shell Alaska's debut offshore drilling program in the U.S. Arctic, the company's Kulluk drilling rig was stuck in monster seas off the coast of Alaska on Friday as its tugboat's engines failed and the Coast Guard cutter that came to assist became entangled in a tow line. There were no immediate threats to crew or equipment, but Shell Alaska was rushing additional aid vessels to the scene as the Kulluk, which drilled the beginnings of an exploratory oil well in the Beaufort Sea over the summer, sat without ability to move forward in 20-foot seas about 50 miles south of Kodiak.

Alex Haley's widow has won a share of his estate and the right to complete his two unfinished books. "It's a glorious day, is what it is," Myran Haley said after the verdict Tuesday. The completion of both works would be "a dream come true," she added. Haley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Roots: The Saga of an American Family," died in 1992 at age 70.

Sixteen years ago, the late Alex Haley tapped into the American consciousness with his landmark ABC miniseries "Roots." More than 100 million people tuned into the 12 hour-drama, based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1976 best-seller, which chronicled Haley's maternal ancestors' origins from Africa and their passage from slavery to freedom in America. Audiences will see a far different family story depicted in "Alex Haley's Queen," the lavish, six-hour miniseries that begins Sunday on CBS.

At this certain time, in this certain village, lived this certain person. --Grandma Yaisa, telling a story to enthralled Mandinka children in "Roots," by Alex Haley. Perhaps it was because enormous commercial success came to him relatively late in his life. Perhaps it was because of his upbringing in Henning, Tenn. Whatever the reason, humility was among "Roots" author Alex Haley's greatest assets and most endearing qualities.

Alex Haley told friends he was just a writer trying to make a living. But his death is a poignant reminder that the former Coast Guard cook tapped the hearts of Americans with two monumental books that transcended literature to become cultural icons. "Roots" and "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" inspired millions to trace their family origins, take pride in racial identity and broaden their grasp of history.

When writer Alex Haley came to Juffure to trace his roots, he found a community of fishermen and farmers rarely touched by outsiders. Today, when tourists visit the village portrayed in Haley's blockbuster "Roots," they find a different Juffure: a place of bitterness and poverty, where begging and Haley-bashing have become a way of life. Lots of tourists come, but that hasn't produced the boom Juffure's people had expected from "Roots."

Joseph M. Wilcots, a trailblazing African American cinematographer whose credits include the landmark 1970s TV miniseries "Roots" and “Roots: The Next Generations ," has died. He was 70. FOR THE RECORD: Wilcots obituary: The obituary of cinematographer Joseph M. Wilcots did not include two of his sisters in the list of survivors. They are Imogene Henry and Angeline Lucas. — Wilcots died Dec. 30 at Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster of complications from a stroke he suffered in 2008, said his manager, Phyllis Larrymore Kelly.

Unlike the acknowledged heroes of February, Alex Haley stooped slightly, was a little overweight and often mumbled when he spoke. Martin Luther King was eloquent, Arthur Ashe graceful and Malcolm X rebellious, which, among other obvious attributes, catapulted them into historical significance.

Phebe Robinson Jacobsen, 78, archivist who helped with genealogical research leading to Alex Haley's epic "Roots." Jacobsen was on duty the spring morning in 1967 that Haley walked into the Maryland Hall of Records in Annapolis, Md., lugging a suitcase full of yellowed photographs and documents.

The U.S. Coast Guard on Saturday honored Alex Haley, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Roots," by commissioning a cutter in his name--the first military vessel named for a journalist. "By seeking his own roots, Alex Haley enlarged the world for millions of Americans, connecting us with a history we thought was lost," said Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, who was the keynote speaker at an invitation-only ceremony at the Coast Guard yard.

Under a sky cleansed by rain, on a morning that gleamed with almost blinding iridescence, the writer Alex Haley rose from racial historian Friday to racial icon. A crowd of 1,500 visitors from across the United States stood in anticipation as a 13-foot-tall bronze statue of the author, the largest in the nation of any African American, was unveiled to hushed silence in Knoxville, Tenn. It was only after a gold-tinted drape was pulled from the monument by L.A.

A new half-hour animated series, PB&J Otter, premieres on the Disney Channel and features the adventures of three young river otters named Peanut, Jelly and Baby Butter. They live on a houseboat with their parents and pet fish. The series will air Satudays and Sundays at 7:30 a.m. For ages 2 to 5. * A teenage girl adopts a newborn seal she rescues from certain death in Summer With Selik (KCET, Sunday at 8 a.m.). The story unfolds on the beautiful western coast of Norway.

Alex Haley's "A Different Kind of Christmas" is the sort of tale that asks to be read aloud. An adventure set during the days of the Underground Railroad, the elusive network of blacks and whites that helped Southern slaves escape to freedom in the North in the turbulent decades before the Civil War, it is the story of Fletcher Randall's conversion from scholarly defender of "his Southland" to avowed abolitionist and outlaw conductor on the legendary railroad.

In his last years, Alex Haley, the celebrated author who made millions from his books and television miniseries, was beset by debt, surrounded by supplicants and "financially abused" by many of the people closest to him, say family members and friends. Haley was not bankrupt when he died last Feb. 10 of a heart attack. But his lavish spending and boundless generosity created financial pressures that were compounded by his failure to complete the books he had started.

I don't know that I began thinking about Alex Haley the night thunder split the air directly over our house, shaking me awake at 4 in the morning. It would make a better story that way, relating Haley with such an elemental force. And he was thunder in his way, shaking the nation into a new awareness of black history. But his was a quiet thunder. I'm talking about the up-close Alex here, not about what he accomplished in a life that ended in turmoil.

Earlier this fall, on a quiet Saturday night in Britain, wedged on BBC 2 after the 7:30 p.m. broadcast of the BBC orchestra and chorus, and just before a 9:40 p.m. rerun of the 1970s sitcom "Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?" was a one-hour documentary that proposed the following: Alex Haley, author of "Roots," one of the biggest bestsellers of the century, winner of almost 300 awards and the most-watched television series ever, was a fraud, plagiarist and phony.